Newport Folk Festival 2025: The Best Things We Saw

“I’m a Southerner,” S.G. Goodman told the crowd towards the end of her Friday afternoon set. “I tell stories; that’s what I do.” Goodman said this by way of apologizing for playing “Heaven Song,” the nine-minute song with which she was about to conclude her quietly stunning performance. But there was no need to say sorry: Goodman’s hour-long showcase of her recent album Planting by the Signs was a subtle, slow-burning display of songwriting mastery. From “Snapping Turtle” to her dusting off 2020’s “Space and Time,” Goodman — fresh off a commanding victory as captain against Kevin Morby’s team in the previous night’s inaugural Newport charity softball game — hooked the crowd with the vivid specificity of the imagery in her songs. It was a vivid trip through, as she sang in the former, “small towns where my mind gets stuck.” 

Few sets felt as anticipated as Remi Wolf’s Saturday afternoon showcase. Billed as “Remi Wolf and Friends,” it promised to be the type of free-flowing, cover-and-special-guest-heavy Newport performance the festival has made its trademark over the years. Wolf did not disappoint, bringing out everyone from Maren Morris (“Angel From Montgomery”), Saya Gray (Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams”), John C. Reilly (“Just the Two of Us”), and an ensemble finale of the Beatles’ “Don’t Let Me Down.” In between, Wolf delivered impassioned renditions of her alt-pop hits like “Sexy Villain,” showed her depth with a beautiful rendition of live rarity “Street You Live On” with Tiny Habits, proved the enduring cultural significance of Shrek with a crowd-pleasing take of “I’m a Believer” with slimdan, and even found time to invite Jeff Tweedy up for a gorgeous duet on Wilco’s 2007 song “Either Way.”

It had been several decades since Mary Chapin Carpenter appeared at Newport. On Sunday afternoon, she collapsed time, seamlessly bridging her indelible early-Nineties country hits with recent selections from 2025’s Personal History. Carpenter brought out that album’s producer, Josh Kaufman, for several moving songs early on (“Saving Things,” “Bitter Ender,”) before running through a series of favorites like “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her,” “The Hard Way,” and “Down at the Twist and Shout” that had fans in tears. It was a gorgeous display of reverence and relevance that showed Carpenter is an inspiration for a new generation as much as a touchstone for her own.

The Queen of Bounce delivered a new flavor of her trademark high-energy live show at the folk festival Friday afternoon. The first half of the set found Big Freedia running through a collection of rowdy bounce numbers, from “Platinum” to her trademark Bill Haley reclamation “Rock around Da Clock” to “Throw It Back,” which featured a number of audience members jumping onstage to twerk. Halfway through, she transitioned from Saturday night to Sunday morning. Beginning with a prayer for Gaza, the Resistance Revival Chorus joined Big Freedia onstage as she previewed songs like “Holy Shuffle” from her forthcoming gospel album. In a space where New Orleans music can feel frozen in the 20th century, Freedia’s bounce showcase was a thrilling and overdue presentation of one of the city’s most vital genres, one that’s been around for long enough — well over 30 years — to make it perfectly fitting to celebrate at Newport.

The last time Hurray for the Riff Raff performed with a full band at Newport was 2017. That year, the singer ended their set with “Pa’lante,” their showstopping, tear-jerking call to action. It happened again on Sunday, when singer-songwriter Alynda Segarra wrapped up a tour-de-force album showcase of their 2024 album The Past is Still Alive with “Pa’lante.” The song has changed shape over the last eight years — Segarra now includes a spoken-word recitation of the poem “If I Must Die” by the slain Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer — but the message remains the same. And it was a message Segarra incorporated throughout their rousing performance, whether on the newly relevant “Precious Cargo” (“I hate you, ICE”) or the recent masterpiece “Snakeplant.” “There’s a war on the people,” Segarra sang during the latter. “What don’t you understand?”

It wasn’t a foregone conclusion that one of this year’s busiest artists at Newport would be the enigmatic 70-year-old cult singer-songwriter Dan Reeder, who spent the weekend jumping onto other artist’s sets, including the headlining performance from Jack Antonoff, who introduced Reeder as one of his all-time favorite songwriters. This was all before Reeder took the stage himself Saturday afternoon for a spellbinding 15-song showcase with his daughter, Peggy Reeder. Performing as an acoustic duo, they sang his hushed cry-laugh folk songs like “Clean Elvis” and his set-closer “Stay Down, Man,” a song so haunting in its hushed beauty that boygenius covered it a few years back. 

What is Newport Folk Festival’s relationship to the current political moment? It’s a valid question to be asking of any space in 2025, and the answer at this year’s festival was answered in some large part by Public Enemy, whose Saturday show provided a necessary injection of the legendary group’s trademark revolutionary hip-hop. Closing on the 40th anniversary of their debut album, Chuck D and Flavor Flav delivered a career-spanning set whose power and potency spoke for itself. Whether it was on newer tunes like 2020’s “State of the Union (STFU)” or their eternal classic “Fight the Power” or 1991’s “Can’t Truss It,” Public Enemy’s high-energy performance (complete with a Flavor Flav stage dive) was a much-needed force of righteous spirit. After the latter song, Chuck D called for an end to violence and conflict across the world, from Palestine to the Congo to Ukraine. “What the fuck is up with these governments, plural?” the legendary rapper asked.

Every year at Newport there are early daytime showcases for debut up-and-comer singer-songwriters that promise to be the last time festival attendees will see such artists on such a small stage. In 2025, that was the case for Ken Pomeroy, the 22-year-old Oklahoma folk singer who hushed the Saturday morning Harbor stage crowd with a 40-minute, eight-song set accompanied only by guitarist Dakota McDaniel. At a festival that relishes sad songs, Pomeroy’s tales of grief, addiction, and heartland loneliness instantly resonated and connected, as did her banter about flopping while opening for Ricky Scaggs and flailing in her acting debut on Sterlin Harjo’s upcoming FX series The Lowdown. But “Bound to Rain,” the new small-town dispatch of “canned food and new tattoos” that she previewed (which will also appear on that show), was a perfect example of her boundless songwriting chops. 

For many, stadium-selling country star Luke Combs was an eyebrow-raising choice for this folk festival. Indeed, his Saturday evening show was unconventional and in ways challenging, but not for the reasons most would’ve assumed: Working overtime to prove his stripped-down songwriter bona fides, Combs spent the first two-thirds of the set performing either sitting down or accompanied only by a piano, telling heartfelt stories and singing quiet songs about his children from his recent Fathers & Sons. (One of them, “Whoever You Turn Out to Be,” left Combs sobbing mid-song.) It was a rare opportunity to watch a superstar genuinely challenge both himself and his audience, with Combs running through live debuts of Darrell Scott’s ancient-sounding “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive” and covering Keb Mo’s arrangement of “The Times They Are a-Changin.’” After an hour, Combs announced he was done crying, said, “I know you didn’t think I was gonna sit my ass on a stool the whole time,” shotgunned a beer, and ran through a 15-minute, high-octane mini-showcase of his stadium show. By the time he closed the evening with his (Tracy Chapman-less) cover of “Fast Car,” it made perfect sense why he was chosen to end the day. 

Special guest tribute sets are, by definition, always a mixed bag, and this year’s Newport concluding set was no different. But the highlights of “Songs for the People,” Sunday’s all-star cover showcase, organized by jack-of-all-trades guitarist-producer and musical director Josh Kaufman of Bonny Light Horseman, featured extraordinary moments of power, protest, fellowship, and simple feel-good sing-alongs. The first showstopping moment came when Margo Price and Logan Ledger performed Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee” (“I’ve got two words: ‘Fuck ICE,’” Price announced before singing). One song later, Mavis Staples, the “mother of Newport,” in the words of the set’s emcee, John C. Reilly, was on stage singing her father’s modern standard “Friendship” with Jeff Tweedy. Lukas Nelson upped the energy level for a searing take on Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World” before everyone came out for the traditional Newport farewell of “Goodnight Irene.”